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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Sidebar Gadgets: Coming soon to a Calendar near you

We've always believed users should have open and unencumbered access to their data, and Google Calendar is no exception. Whether through iCalendar, CalDAV, or the Calendar Data API, there are a multitude of options to access Calendar from other applications. However, developers have been asking for a way to extend the Google Calendar interface itself, and we've been listening.

Gadget developers will already be familiar with most of this environment, complete with features such as OpenSocial for social networking and OAuth for working with third-party services. However, for the first time we're also providing an API to control and interact with the Calendar user interface. This means that even though your gadgets are running inside a sandbox, they are first-class elements of the Calendar user experience. In fact, many of the experiments we've made available through Calendar Labs were written using the publicly available gadget API.

I'm not a programmer, but I would hope to see a google gadget that makes a large calendar in which I can see a whole month, and the names of all-day events, similar to how people use hard copy calendars. You could see b-days ahead of time and deadlines better that way.